Doha

Doha International Airport is a destination that I have twice passed through, each time staying for only a few fleeting and stimulating hours.  It is a place where cultures meet: central Africa with the traditional Middle East, Greater Arabia with Southeast Asia and truly, anybody else that may fall in between. A few who do not fit the “in between” category, including myself, can also be seen here though we are few and immeasurably uninteresting through my eyes.

Arabic and English seem to be the languages chosen for mass communication here in the forms of loudspeaker announcements, business transactions and pleasantries. People of every color busily congregate or determinedly navigate through the tight spaces full of human energy. The variety of skin tones are so astounding that if one were to organize these travellers and their skin shades from lightest to darkest it would be a visual illusion where hundreds of soft and subtle browns graduate ever so slightly, one by one, to eventually reveal a palette ranging from the extremes of wedding white to deep-lake black. 

The facial features of these temporary nomads are extraordinary and even more diverse. Noses are flat and wide, un-bridged and flared, narrow and monolithic.  Eyes bear colors only of our planet earth: blacks, browns, greens and blues shaped in forms of slitted and narrow to wide set and wide open. And gracing these varied eyes can be found eyelashes that are reaching, filigreed or fanning.  Brown, pink, red and black are the color of the lips, gums and tongues of these foreigners. These moving lips are thin, billowing, smiling, mustached and veiled. All of these features rest upon faces that have no common form. There are sharp jaws, chiseled cheek bones, sprawling foreheads, facial outlines as round and full as a harvest moon, cherubic and ample, gaunt and hanging. Faces bear expressions of warmth and friendliness, aggression and threat, intensity and lust, angst, fatigue and curiosity.  It seems that I can see everything here, all at once and I am awed. I cannot choose a face to rest my gaze on for more than a moment before I am distracted by yet another.

What seems to most amaze me, however, are the dramatically different sounds that these ranging and roving mouths make. I hear noises in languages that communicate messages as mystical and unknown to me as that as a frogs’ ribbit or the bugling of an elk.  I cannot even discern the tone, mood or intent  behind their words. They are sounds I am hearing for the very first time in my life and I wonder how it is that they can make any sense to anybody.  My head is swimming as I come to experience just how big our world is and how little my experience within it has been.

I sit, watch, listen, lower my eyes, stay quiet and try to look demure. I resist taking a single photo at this multicultural intersection for fear of being seen as rude, intrusive or far too North American for my own good.

The most dramatic of our human differences is demonstrated in our attire, our costuming, so to speak. While nothing that I wear feels much like anything traditional or cultural, I suppose that in some ways, it must be. And it would seem that we all wear our cultures in one way or another. I marvel at the eclectic collection of styles, fabrics, formalities and colors found throughout this small space. I see turquoise and gold saris, shirtless men wrapped in white sheets and scarves, sheiks in robes and headdresses, women in salwars and hijabs, the occasional westerner in jeans and a t-shirt, bare feet. Most alarmingly, for myself personally, is to see for the first time, in the flesh, women in full black burkas. Head to toe coverage in heavy black fabrics, including gloved fingertips. Nothing but a narrow window in a drape for the eyes to indicate that inside is a human being. I am saddened, uncomfortable, outraged, biased. There is no way of knowing that there is a woman inside and whether she is 18 or 80, happy or pained. They glide along the airport floor like floating black and untouchable souls.

This place, Doha International, exposes me to many of the world’s cultures from which I am entirely removed. It is an educational experience that leaves me feeling beholden to the place and time in which I was born.  There is no way, alone, that I can better understand what it is that I am seeing and so what I do is this: I try again to sit, watch and listen but this time, as best I can, I absorb the experience of humanity, without judgment or value. We are all human. And, we are all going somewhere.